You might think this article is about the rise and rise of
mobile but you’d be wrong. It’s a simple
tale of a customer wishing to save money by reducing the number of lines they
have coming into the building.
We were asked about the implications for their phone system
if the lines were changed from ISDN30 to ISDN2 back in August 2012. We
recommended, as they were a software house, with large broadband capacity a
simple move to SIP trunks which could have been done quite quickly and migrated
all of their existing Direct Dials (DDI’s). Bearing in mind their system was 9
years old they were also thinking they may have had to change the system which
would’ve kind of defeated the object of saving money. However, as the system
was a Splicecom maximiser a simple free software upgrade was all that was
required.
In October we were advised that they were having the lines
changed over by BT Local Business. In February, some 4 months later we received
notification that BT were ready to change over the lines so we arranged an
engineer to visit site to upgrade the system and programme it accordingly. This
all went smoothly and was left awaiting the completion of the changeover. A
couple of days later we were advised by the customer that there was a fault
with the system as calls were not getting through. This was investigated and to
our horror we found, after sitting on the phone for 45 minutes that BT had not
completed the work and all calls to the DDI’s could not be delivered. This
necessitated a small temporary programme change to ensure that the customer was
receiving all calls to their site.
But it got worse. We then found out that there were
underground problems which was delaying the delivery of the DDI’s and even
though BT Local were telling the customer the installation was complete it was
in fact far from complete. We had further discussions with the specialist BT
ISDN team who, to their credit, did eventually advise when the job was
complete. This was some 6 weeks after our initial visit. And you’d think that
would be the end of it but oh no.
When the DDI’s were eventually delivered the customer found
they had a new set of DDI’s which meant that all their employees contact
details had changed. Furthermore the phone system had to be reprogrammed again
with the new numbers. Fine at last you think. Oh no.
A week later the customer calls to say that their fax
machine is not working and thinks again that there is a problem with the phone
system. W advise him that the call to the fax machine is not being delivered
and to check with BT. Behold, this number has dropped off the system as a
Single Number DDI and BT have to reset it. As they had previously changed the
delivery configuration on the ISDN from 4 to 6 digits there was a small
programming change required on the system before the fax would work.
Finally, the changeover had been completed.
Like a lot of things in life complex solutions have been
simplified and we take them for granted. Delivering a call over a copper wire
to the correct person through a corporate phone system is a complex problem.
When executed incorrectly you end up with problems that are challenging, time
consuming and costly.
